During disk drive manufacture, mechanical components must be precisely assembled with extremely narrow tolerances so that the completed device performs to specifications and has good long-term reliability. To facilitate this, individual components are usually tested, electrically, magnetically, and mechanically, prior to assembly. However, adequate pre-assembly performance does not assure that the components are within specifications after assembly. Typically, after assembly and servowriting, a disk drive is tested for magnetic performance. Unfortunately, this post-assembly testing is not sufficient because magnetic performance testing does not guarantee mechanical reliability. In fact, drives featuring excellent magnetic performance often exhibit the worst mechanical performance. This is a consequence of the fact that magnetic performance improves with decreasing magnetic head-disk spacing, whereas mechanical reliability deteriorates with decreasing physical head-disk separation. Due to this dichotomy between mechanical and magnetic performance, screening for mechanical performance prior to servowriting the head-disk assembly and/or after final assembly of the disk drive could eliminate the risk of shipping unreliable disk drives to customers. Moreover, if such problems are detected before servowriting, considerable time and expense involved in the completion and testing of the disk drives could be saved. A mechanical head-disk spacing test can improve quality, reduce the incidence of mechanical failures, and increase the yield in disk drive assembly and testing. Thus, there is a need for a method and apparatus which quickly and easily tests disk drives for adequate head-disk spacing as well as overall mechanical reliability. It is the primary object of the present invention to meet this need.